Feeling Lonely With Yourself

Washing my hands in front of a three-way mirror in one of those swanky NY hotel bathrooms, I caught that weird angle of my face looking elsewhere.  I typically use three-way mirrors to make sure clothes aren't too tight on the derrière, but this was an accidental glance. I saw what I look like to other people. and for a milli-second I didn't realize it was me. My profile has always perplexed me, in pictures especially, I often see a ghost lurking in my features. I look a lot like my mom but friends always remark that from the side I look different, like someone else.

My hands still wet and full of soap, I stared at the awkward reflection and thought to myself, "I must see 'him'." Thoughts like this often drift into my mind and then quickly exit, but on this occasion I got stuck and felt a mist of sadness fall over me. I saw this tall woman in her black dress, pearls and a somewhat serious gaze. I thought how sad it was that she would never get to know who her father was.....that she would not know his identity....or ever see his picture. I snapped back to reality and asked myself, "Is that really true?" My mind was like a bicycle with a chain that wasn't gripping the gears. I went a little blank but then realized, "yes it is true, it's extremely likely you will go to your grave having never known who your father was." A surreal moment.

As usual, I was having an emotional crisis at an incredibly inopportune time. There I was, gut wrenched as toilet bowls flushed behind me and a conference full of coworkers waited for my return. I packed the feeling in a small little box and pushed it to the back of mind...all the way behind the old boyfriends and failures I hate to think about. As a practice, I try not to have pity parties for myself -- especially in bathrooms. Being analytical tends to numb bad feelings but despite my best efforts, longing still catches me in vulnerable moments.

Since the bathroom episode I've had trouble talking and writing about donor conception. It feels like I have something caught in my throat. In the past, expressing my views on anonymous donation or engaging in debate with the donor-conceived community was invigorating. Writing especially was extremely cathartic; a way to capture conflicting feelings and process them. I might have been naive, but I felt I shared something valuable. Yet, lately I even find reading news on donor conception makes me feel a bit sad. I get a paragraph or two into an article and I can't concentrate. I avoid my laptop for fear of experiencing the guilt for not writing.

Only weeks ago my emotions hit a crescendo when my Family Finder  DNA results revealed a number of third cousins as well as an Eastern European heritage. I was filled with hope. For the first time in very, very long time, I felt less lost....less unknown. I've connected with many of my "third cousins," but sharing just great-great-grandparents isn't as definitive a link as one might think. The likelihood that anyone I've connected with has met glances with the ghost in my profile is slim to none.

This truth is neither surprising nor unrealistic so I'm not sure why it's suddenly occurring to me. Nonetheless, it feels like a sudden, and somewhat heart-breaking loss.

I don't really talk much about it on this blog, but I don't have the best relationship with the father that raised me. I'm not sure why I'm mentioning this now, but somehow in my mind its all connected to the feeling of deep loss. Thirty years ago my father and mother decided to create a family bound by a painful secret. They agreed to conceal the nature of my conception as their doctor had instructed (though my mom told me at 23, but that is another story.) My dad has some great qualities and he was nice sometimes but for the most part my memories of him were of fear. I remember feeling like I couldn't breath when I heard him come home from work. He was emotionally, verbally and sometimes physically abusive to my brother and I throughout our lives. At risk of over-simplifing what is an incredibly complex story of pain and denial, I believe my brother and I were the personification of what he perceived to be his greatest failure: the inability, as a man, to produce a child. What's more, he was completely emotionally unavailable. Sometimes fearing him was an odd and dysfunctional way to feel connected to him.

To this day, I conceal the nature of my conception from all of my extended family members so that he doesn't suffer the pain and embarrassment of them knowing he is sterile. Sometimes I forget the truth.  Other times, in random and inopportune moments, the truth feels like a hammock full of bricks weighing down my heart. My mother says letting others know the truth would "destroy him." Throughout my twenties, despite his behavior towards myself and my brother, I felt overwhelmingly sorry for him. How could I be so ungrateful as to want to share the nature of my identity with close family members? He may have been detached and often downright mean, but he stayed, he went to work, he told people he was my "Dad." How could I be such a selfish child? Of course, my mother and father's emotional well-being should take priority over my own.

I think a lot of people with opinions on anonymous sperm donation operate under the assumption that the children are going to homes where they are wanted so very much. The typical pro-donor conception argument involves sperm being given away by one man who doesn't want to father a child, to a man that does ...a man, that will love those children like his own. Though few are willing to admit it, this isn't always the case. Some men decide on donor conception without knowing what their reaction will be and some men have reservations but feel pressured by the pleading look on the face of a wife that deeply wants to be a mother. 

Nonetheless, people will still contend that those DC children unhappy with their situation should get over their feelings of loss and be grateful for life. 

At least right now, I find it hard to be grateful for my parents decisions.

Technorati Tags: Anonymous, Children, Family, Sperm Donor, Society, Women, Social, Infertility

Books on Artificial Insemination

A while back I asked for recommendations on Donor and AI books and never got around to providing background and links. Here is a list and links of what I recieved if you are interested:

Who Am I?: Experiences of Donor Conception

Behind Closed Doors: Moving Beyond Secrecy and Shame (Voices of Donor Conception)

Experiences of Donor Conception: Parents, Offspring and Donors through the Years

Sperm Donor Offspring:: Identity and Other Experiences

Dr Alvin C. Weseley

So I found out today it was not Dr. Decker but Dr. Alvin C. Weseley who inseminated my mother. It's so frustrating that as donor offspring our backgrounds are kept so secret and guarded. After looking for Dr. Decker for years, now I have to change my search completely. Life can be so overwhelming sometimes.....

Flirting with Identity.

Jake was the gay, liberal dad I never knew I had. Late one night I sat staring at his quirky MySpace page on my laptop in a state somewhere between elation and confusion. There he was, standing with two hands resting on the handle of a shovel stuck in the dirt. The crooked smile and deep brown eyes looking back at me from the screen seemed familiar.

Jake's post had been on the donor sibling registry board for a long time but since it said "Jewish Russian" I'd passed over it. He'd donated to the same Park Avenue clinic in which my mother was inseminated, but she had asked for a Christian, Polish donor. Hence, I assumed that's what she got. A day earlier, in a moment of lucidity I wondered how she could be so sure. I mean, what verification occurs to assure the nationality of a donor or his religion if we don't even know his name? I mean, duh.

I surfed further to his online photo album via a link provided on his profile. My hands grew a bit sweaty and my finger vibrated a bit with each click of the mouse.  I wasn't quite sure why I was so nervous. My initial exploration was driven less by the desire to identify him and more by basic voyeuristic curiosity. How could this man be bearing his soul online when I'm afraid to post my picture on a blog where I have poured my heart about a family secret? And there he was, a gay actor.

 I stared, refocused and read again.

A gay actor?

He had been with his "partner" for years. They stood together in picture after picture, sometimes at home, sometimes on vacation.

A sudden fire engine outside my apartment made me jump up and then a split second later I was struck by laughter. Not because he was gay - how cool is that - but at the sheer ridiculousness of this entire situation. From my mother's insemination by some medical intern 30 years ago, to me sitting at a laptop contemplating gentic relation via a frigin MySpace page, this was just total ridiculousness. I could just imagine my Mom reacting to the news about the donor....

"But I ordered a Catholic polish medical intern!"she would say angrily.

"Sorry Ma, looks like things went a little differently," I'd say.

God, I would need a camera when I told her.

I continued to click through pictures with a guilty pleasure. It was like I was exploring myself in some detached way. He had an entire album of family photos. While his recent photos made him look a bit worn out, my resemblance to his younger photos was uncanny.

So I wrote an email to him via MySpace:

"Hi - I saw your post on the Donor Sibling Registry and viewed your pictures.You donated to the same clinic the same year that my mom was insemminated. Here is a photo of myself and if you see a resemblance too, we can move forward from there."

Short and sweet, I thought. Not to weird...very matter of fact. I mean there isn't a book of etiquette out there on this type of stuff. It's funny because I'm normally not so rigid but for some reason I felt a need to be stern, be sterile, be emotionless, but logical. Ironically, so similar to the essence of artificial insemination itself - something so special and life changing done in a methodical medical fashion. I can never forget my mother telling me in the days before sperm freezing, the vile was brought in a brown paper bag to the office from the hospital around the corner. God, can't get more detached than that.

I waited. I checked mail every hour - as if there was any chance that he check email at 11pm at night. I obsessed about it. Was he near a computer, now? How about now? Was he opening it? I tried to visualize him opening my message. Did he have an organized desk, or a cluttered desk? A laptop or a PC? Was he a Mac guy?

The night past without response.

In off moments on busy days I would find myself thinking about my email or Jake. I would practice redirecting my mind to something else. I had perfected this practice when I had gone on that first date with some guy I was interested in but wanted to temper my excitement so I wasn't hurt..keep my options open...guard myself. Yet we weren't dating, this man could be my biological father- weird, I know. But there was a similarity, this was the first step in a potentially important relationship and I felt so vunerable.

And then, I checked my personal mail at work and saw it "Jake2134." I clicked to open it:

"Dear ---,

Fate would have that I checked my yahoo email today, something I rarely do anymore. I went to myspace and was only able to open one of your attachments. You are a very beautiful woman. Can you send the attachments to this email. I check this email daily. I do see a resemblance. The only way to find out is to do a DNA test. The test cost about 130.00 which I would be glad to split the difference. I also have copies of my DNA test.

Truly yours.
Jake."

To Be Continued.......

UPDATED - This story was continued in two later posts Confronting Identity and Not The Man

Technorati Tag: Anonymous, Children, Family, Parenting, Internet, Pregnancy, Society, Women, Social, Infertility, Gay

Long Time No See

I have not written in a while and much has happened. I thought I had discovered a potential match on the Donor Sibling Registry Boards and immersemed myself in looking at his pictures and contemplating his background via facebook. The resemblance was uncanny....the story is long and I will sign on later to explain - for now I have to go to work and get on with things.

Do they really understand?

Last night I was out with some friends and they began critiquing their facial features at the dinner table. One friend does not like her nose, the other finds her forehead too big and another said she would have dimples surgically added if she could. I thought of the uneven dimples that set me apart from my family and found myself unable to participate.

My friend's see their faces as the most intimate expression of themselves, something they accept as their own and can therefore contemplate altering. My face represents something very different to me. I can't tell you the countless hours I have spent staring in the mirror wondering what part of my face is from my biological father. It's like playing one of those magazine games that ask you to compare two pictures to find the 10 differences. I scan my nose, my eyes, my chin and think of my mother's face. What is different? I imagine my face on a man. I compare my face to my brother's, who shares only my Mom's genetic lineage and try to pull out the sameness. Faces take on a different meaning when you cannot mentally separate your features into two parts. They become a map of your confusion and for some, a reminder of your search.

Coming home from dinner a family in Yankee gear got on the train after the parade and I began tracing the features from the faces of the mother and father to their children. On the subway I find myself totally engaged when families get in the same car. Its funny how certain features blend, like the shape of a jaw but others are one or the other like noses. The Dad in this family had a very prominent nose and the Mom had a small button nose. I giggled when it struck me that it was either one nose or the other. But I digress, the point I am trying to make is that the donor sibling experience really preoccupies you with concepts of inheritance.

Yesterday I wrote about collective experience and I believe it all connects. Faces are just another way of connecting to those around us and feeling that we share something. For children of sperm donors, that relation is hard to come by.

My face is one of the few things my biological father gave me, so I won't be getting a nose job anytime soon.

But liposuction, now that's not totally out of the question :)

Frankenstein Finds Hope in An Envelop

Yesterday I asked my Mom to put her cells in an envelop with mine and send them to a lab in Michigan. I had the CaBRI Medical Center envelops on my desk for nearly a year and could not bring myself to ask her. As much as I want to pull the dark covers away and expose what happened in the bright light of day, its so hard to talk to her. It's nothing terrible. I mean, its the creation of a child, but somehow it makes me feel guilty to push her for information. This is not the story that gets told online and in those happy Dateline reports but I believe it is actually very common.

I think my Mom sees herself as my sole creator in so many ways. She is not my only parent, she is married to my Dad and while he is my father he is not genetically related to my creation. Here's where the contemplation gets a bit sticky - while its physcologically exceptable for the human conscious to think of itself as the sole creator of another being, the mind is perplexed by the idea that we are created solely by one. The idea of "one creator" is not at all new, I mean look at literature from Frankenstein to Jesus Christ to Roman Mythology, we have all these examples of a child coming from just one parent. Laughably its typically only from men, but I won't even start on that rant.

I remember reading the story of Athena springing from the head of Zeus in college and laughing out loud that Ma must have seen it that way. She does not know who that other individual is, she does not know his name, his face or the swagger of his walk. So its easy to feel like I just grew inside her like magic, like the immaculate conception, like an ameba that just popped off her side through fission.

I remember asking her one day, "Ma, what about me is different? What do you see in me that makesyou say, 'this does not come from me'"

She just sat there for a moment and looked like she was honestly contemplating the question, scanning me for signs of "him" and she came up with nothing.

I crinkled my brow and looked at her in disbelief, "honestly Ma?"

She thought again.

"Well, I don't know where you get the big feet and small boobs from, but other than that, no, nothing." Of course only the undesirable things could be "other" and that makes things even more convenient. Anytime you stumble on some bad characteristic you just chalk it up to the sperm.

All humor aside, I don't fault her for the perspective and I know how much she loves me. It's her way of dealing with an issue that I can't personally resolve. I won't quote Frankenstein here, I did that enough in college, but the chapters on the woes of his creation definitely come to mind. It's important to note that Frankenstein is the name of the creator, not his beastly creation whom we fear so much. I read and examined the text throughout college and my heart was just ripped out for the beast. I felt his tumult, his confusion. I did not relate to anything evil he did but I could see how he felt such loss. I can understand how the idea of just one parent rather than an entire identity could frustrate you to insanity.

So in those small pieces of us, placed in an envelope and shipped to MidWest, I too began the path to pull together something of separate human pieces, an identity, a creator, a reason for my small breasts :) and big feet.

Google and Sperm Donation

NOTE from Girl Conceived: This was my very first post on the blog.

Most of us can claim a romantic night, a back seat romp or fun times at a concert as the moment we "came to be." But some of us are the product of a premeditated act by two individuals who have never seen each other. We are donor-conceived, born of assisted reproduction. On the surface technology seems to enable us to do a lot these days. We can sit at our computers and do things we would never do in public. We can chat about taboo subjects, explore secret areas of interest, look at porn, and blog about issues we don't want to claim in person. Yet most of this activity is not as anonymous as we think. Cookies, Web histories and behavioral tracking are just a few of the mechanisms out there designed to gather perhaps the most valuable information on the Internet: demographic and consumer data. It's disheartening but not very surprising. All major forms of media have a commercial element that help them to advance and thrive. The Internet is not much different than its predecessors like TV and radio. Ironically there are conception scenarios where far, far less is known.

As the child of a sperm donor and a Mom and Dad that were desperate to have a child, technology plays a somewhat unusual role in my life. As an adult, working in technology and managing it's benefits for corporate gain blurs the lines of my values and beliefs. My mind runs in circles when I put together presentations on "technical solutions" and I contemplate what that terms means to me, the girl conceived by reproductive technology. While technology is typically viewed as the "resolution" to so many problems, for me, it is the root of my most plaguing problems.

The concept I struggle with most often is the ying-to-yang quality of technology.Our smiling faces on Web-sites like FaceBook and MySpace expose our lives, connect and let us be known by the world. Simultaneously, genetic and reproductive technology still operate on foundations of anonymity. Sperm, and eggs are move from one body to another without the receipient knowing the shape of a donor's smile or sometimes even their name. The cells that grow new skin over our wounds or the DNA that architects the scale of our faces can be anonymously delivered via technology.

These are the concepts, ideas and questions that keep me from blissful sleep at night and inspire me to learn, explore and write. For 28 years this has been a personal and private journey but in this age of collaboration and advancement, I wonder if these questions can't be answered using the very source of their conception - technology. And so, I begin that effort today in hopes that our shared conversation can lead us somewhere that makes a bit more sense.